How to Raise Queen Bees - Hands-on Classes and/ or Good Reference Books

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How to Raise Queen Bees - Hands-on Classes and/ or Good Reference Books

This is going to be the year I try it - grafting my own queens, provided my hives make it through the winter.

I've had one hands-on class with Melanie (Zia Bees), but would like to get a little more before this Spring. Been reading, asking questions of other, more experience Beeks, but thought I'd pose the question here.

If you know of any good hands-on classes/ coursework and/ or reference materials which may help guide me on my information quest, please share!

Another referemce book that comes to mind is Dr. Lawrence John Connor's Bee Sex Essentials, and of course, Brother Adam's Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey, Breeding the Honeybee, and In Search of the Best Strains Of Bees, but as Mike Palmer mentions, Laidlaw and Page's Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding is my primary reference. And thanks to Tony P. for bringing back Oldtimer's fantastic thread of 2010!

Sunny - also check to see if Dr. Connor is lecturing anywhere near Durango. He gives a great hands-on and explanation on queen rearing. Also, if you can catch Dr. Cobey at a public lecture like she gave to a bee club out here in California, you'd be getting advise from the best. Either of them is worth the price of a plane ticket and a quick vacation a hundred times over.

One thing is sure, be sure to read that link that Toekneepea put in post#2 of this thread. Oldtimer gives a fantastic how-to in the (modified) Henry Alley / Jay Smith "Cut-Cell" method of queen rearing. Also look for Michael Palmer's method of setting up a Cell Builder colony. He uses Brother Adam's method, except that he brings in capped brood frames from over-wintered nucleus colonies instead of from honey production colonies. I wish I had money enough to fly down to New Zealand and see his operation, the Cloake's operation, and meet the remaining beekeepers in Sir Edmund Hillary's family, among other excellent NZ beekeepers. What a "lecture / workshop" that would be!

Here's Michael Palmer's explanation of Kirk Webster's method. READ to the END and note that he has changed over to Brother Adam's method,which he has modified:

I'm working on a method that combines the benefits of the Cloake Board method with Michael Palmer's method, also a calendar for drone rearing, queen rearing, I.I., and open mating! It's kind of, shall we say, intense...

Other than that, be sure to 1) start a calendar, 2) build your queen bank frames and a bunch of queen cages before you need them, 3) build enough nucleus boxes and frames this winter for mating season later this coming spring, and 4) order your foundation, if you use it. Springtime gets way too busy to suddenly have to build a bunch of boxes and frames!

The main basics are to use a strong well fed queenless hive or unit to start the cells.

Graft, comb cut, or whatever in such a way the bees can build the queen cells pointing straight down. The very simplest way of doing this is just to trim away part of a comb where eggs or just hatched larvae are, so the cells can be built straight down from there.

Day before hatching, cells are transferred to some kind of queenless nuc, if there is no natural flow at the time give them a little syrup which aids in acceptance of the cell.

To me, there can be a huge array of methods designed to suit the beekeeper that will produce fine queens, if they incorporate these basics.

At the risk of sounding psychotic, I've been stalking Susan Cobey, looking for contact information, sending email to any email address I can find online (UC Davis, etc), in which I ask if she plans to speak somewhere or offer a class or have any other ideas on quality hands-on resources. A trip to CA sounds good to me!